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Behind the Business with Glue PR

Bdaily goes behind the business with Christian Cerisola, director of Newcastle-based communications agency, Glue PR.

What does your organisation do?

Glue PR is a Newcastle-based communications agency that creates compelling, engaging and sharable content that influences customer behaviour. My area of expertise is that I help organisations identify and articulate their stories across online, social and offline media platforms.

What key challenges has your company recently faced?

Having just passed our first anniversary, the challenge of establishing ourselves in what is becoming an increasingly crowded marketplace has been really exciting and rewarding.

What is your biggest achievement over the past 12 months?

It was a wonderful feeling to be able to hire my first full time employee a few months ago. It seems to have quickly gone from going it alone and panicking about how to pay the mortgage to being responsible for someone else paying theirs. The sense of responsibility is really enriching and has driven me to continue to try to grow the business.

What is your most important focus for the coming year, and what do you hope to achieve?

I want to keep giving clients great value. There’s nothing better than working with senior and successful individuals, offering my honest opinion on what could make them better and seeing them execute that with positive outcomes. Good communications has become more important than ever and I want to help more businesses acknowledge that.

What excites you most about your industry and business?

I’m really excited with the direction search engine optimisation has evolved. SEO specialists are now having to figure out how to place their clients in respected media titles for biggest SEO successes. This calls for proper media and PR understanding and experience.

What will be the “next big thing“ in your industry, and how do you plan to handle it?

There have been many false dawns for the PR industry and, as a collective, the sector has failed to grasp them and take ownership. SEO and social media are two such areas that skilled and experienced PR practitioners are perfectly placed to offer great insight, but the industry has allowed others to take huge chunks of that market.

Identifying quality communications as a management discipline will help the industry. Businesses will readily hire accountants, tax planners and lawyers, but still think the communications is a job they can do themselves. I don’t understand it. Those getting ahead have identified that proper communications advice and execution deserves a seat at the top table.

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